The Uesugi army's main camp was pitched in a mountain pass between two peaks.
The ground had been chosen with great care—the ridge to the north at its back, a gentle slope to the south, and to the east and west the natural moats cut by mountain streams. Only a single corridor some twenty zhang wide, due south, had been left open as the entrance and exit.
It was a camp of three thousand men, the tents ranged in orderly rows, campfires scattered like stars against the night.
Before the main tent at the camp's center a great banner flew high, white ground with blue lettering, looking especially solemn under the moonlight.
But what truly made Kōbe Hikaru halt was not those tents and standards.
It was the qi.
He stood on a low knoll half a li beyond the camp's southern edge, blood mist spreading thin beneath his feet, stretching his range of perception to its limit.
And then he felt it.
Human qi.
The pure, steaming breath of humanity formed by three thousand people gathered together.
Not the turbid, heavy thing that was yōkai aura, nor the clear, translucent presence that was spiritual power.
But something caught between yōkai and spirit—an impure force, radiated by living mortals.
Breath, heartbeat, the flow of blood, the fall of footsteps.
Three thousand breaths, three thousand heartbeats, converging into a single formless flood.
The flood itself carried no aggression.
But once it was unified, guided, and shaped by something—it became another thing entirely.
Military might.
Faith.
Human qi congealed into momentum, and momentum transformed into faith.
In this age, dread was the power a yōkai drew from human fear, while faith was the power congealed from human reverence toward some existence, concrete or abstract.
The two were one thing seen from two faces, both the making-concrete of the heart.
Only, unlike dread, faith was more unified, purer, heavier.
That was why a divine artifact bearing this kind of power could achieve the suppression of every extraordinary existence.
And ordinary faith, though it could not match a divine artifact, still carried a certain suppressive effect.
It was plain to see.
The army of the Uesugi clan was unlike that of the Imagawa or the Hōjō.
The Imagawa's soldiers gathered because of their lord's command; the Hōjō's soldiers fought because of loyalty to the family.
These two were the most classic armies of the feudal age. They too, naturally, were gathered together, could possess human qi, possess momentum, possess so-called military might.
But the Uesugi's soldiers—theirs came from something one layer deeper: faith.
They believed in Bishamonten.
They believed their lord was the god of war descended into the world, believed that following her they would be invincible.
This faith was no slogan spoken with the lips, but a thing revered to the marrow.
The faith of three thousand converged and formed an invisible field of force that shrouded the entire camp.
It was an unseen shell, and when yōkai aura approached the edge of that shell, it was naturally repelled and diluted.
Kōbe Hikaru could feel it clearly—as his blood mist neared within three hundred paces of the camp, its rate of spread noticeably slowed.
There was no barrier.
No trace of any spellcraft.
Only the pure will of human hearts, turned as one.
And even as he watched—
Something stirred at the eastern edge of the camp.
Three small yōkai crept out of the underbrush.
All of them low-grade stock, roughly Two or Three Mutations, like moths drawn to the "heat" gathered from those three thousand people.
They had no reason, no cognition; the instinct of yōkai drove them toward the crowd.
The more people, the thicker the grudge-rancor—that should have been their finest source of food.
But this time, beyond any doubt, they had it wrong.
This was no ordinary three thousand.
This was three thousand congealed by faith.
The first small yōkai charged into the three-hundred-pace perimeter of the camp.
The instant its body touched that invisible field of force—it was as though an unseen hand had clenched around it.
Yōkai aura began to peel from its surface, like dry mud flaking off a stone, crumbling away piece by piece.
It let out a shrill screech and scrambled backward with all its strength.
But it was too late.
The momentum of faith was no barrier; it had no clear boundary line. It was gradual, diffuse, everywhere at once.
Once you stepped in, it was like walking into a waist-deep mire—the more you struggled, the deeper you sank.
The small yōkai's body disintegrated completely within three breaths.
Not even dregs remained.
It did not even make a sound loud enough to alert the sentries—that momentum of faith swallowed its screech as well, like cotton soaking up water.
The second retreated a step, but that step was still within the field.
Its outer shell began to solidify, its body turning rigid.
The next instant, it shattered.
Without a sound.
The last small yōkai reacted fastest and turned to flee.
But it fled less than ten steps before it was scattered like a wisp of smoke blown apart by the wind, vanishing into the night.
Three small yōkai, and not one could make so much as a stir.
From approach to annihilation, no more than ten breaths in all.
The soldiers in the camp did not even notice.
They had no need to notice.
The momentum of faith completed everything in their stead—like an invisible city wall, crushing all extraordinary things that tried to draw near.
This too was plainly no exception, but the norm.
That human qi drew yōkai was the norm.
That military might could crush yōkai was even more the norm.
This was by no means a special case.
Kōbe Hikaru witnessed all of it.
And he could feel with unusual clarity that small yōkai below Corporeal Transformation, Six Mutations, had not even the qualification to exist before this field of force.
He stretched his perception a little farther.
To the north of the camp, on a mountain path about half a li away, another yōkai was taking a detour.
It was a yōkai chieftain above Seven Mutations, the size of a calf, its whole body covered in coarse grey hide-armor, its four hooves leaving deep prints.
Its original course would have taken it past the camp.
But once it sensed that momentum of faith, it stopped.
It stood still for a long while.
Then it silently turned aside, swinging out west in a wide arc.
It would rather walk half a day longer than draw near that range.
As a high-grade yōkai it possessed more than instinct; it had a certain wisdom, and it knew—to keep on straight was only to enter a place of death.
Yes. So it was.
Even a high-grade yōkai had no wish to collide with military might, with faith.
"So this is what true faith is."
Kōbe Hikaru murmured beneath the oni mask.
Opposite in direction to dread, yet the effect converged upon the same end.
And more—as the thin mist parted a little, his perception drove deeper.
Beneath that dense layer of human qi, he caught something heavier than ordinary faith.
Scattered across the camp, several presences unlike any common person.
Golden, pure, lofty.
Sprung from the same source as the power he had felt earlier in Kakizaki Kageie and Yamagata Masakage, yet each distinct from the others.
As he had thought—there was not just one.
There were several.
"One, two, three—"
Kōbe Hikaru silently counted the sources of that divine-artifact power.
"Four."
Four maiden warriors bearing the power of a divine artifact, stationed apart across the four quarters of the camp.
East, south, west, north—each guarding one direction, like four nails anchoring the whole camp to the earth, firmly propping up a fortress-like domain that sealed the inside off from the outside.
The strengths of these four presences were uneven.
The strongest lay to the east; the concentration of that divine-artifact power surpassed even Kakizaki Kageie, and far exceeded the other three.
The weakest was to the west, only about two-thirds of Kakizaki Kageie's.
The other two lay in between, neither high nor low, a shade beneath Kakizaki Kageie.
The sense of it was hazy, but judged purely by the threat it pressed upon Kōbe Hikaru, it was hard to be much mistaken.
"Four reincarnated divine artifacts, and the faith-momentum of three thousand."
Kōbe Hikaru reached his judgment.
A frontal charge was absolutely out of the question.
Even though his combat power now far surpassed what it had been three months ago, to force his way into a camp reinforced by human qi and military might, and moreover anchored by four divine artifacts, would still bring great trouble—it was hard to be at all certain of the outcome.
But no matter; he had never intended to charge in headlong.
Kōbe Hikaru turned his head.
On the slope of the knoll behind him, more than two hundred undead skeletons still stood in silence.
Blood mist shrouded them, corpse-fire leaping in their hollow sockets, awaiting his command.
But if he sent them in like this—they would not last more than a few seconds.
The fate of those small yōkai was proof enough.
Pure fragments of the dead, they were even less than those small yōkai of merely Two or Three Mutations; to enter the field of faith and military might was no different from sending them to their deaths.
So Kōbe Hikaru did one thing.
He crouched and pressed his palm to the nearest skeleton.
[Bone Soul Transformation].
White bone spikes extended from his fingertips, wrapping around that skeleton's ribcage.
Not weaponized bone spikes, but a thin membrane of bone—coating the outer surface of the remains, like sheathing a fragile thing in a shell.
Protection.
Not to ward off blade and spear.
But to insulate the pure yōkai aura from the direct erosion of the faith-momentum—even if only for an instant.
Bone was a materialized entity, not a pure congealing of yōkai aura. What the faith-momentum crushed was extraordinary structure; against a physical entity its effect was far weaker.
Not ineffective.
Only a little slower.
That little bit slower—was enough.
Kōbe Hikaru wrapped the two hundred-odd skeletons one by one, his movements quick, but each one cost a certain amount of yōkai power.
When it was done, his breathing had grown a touch heavier. "Disperse."
Kōbe Hikaru's voice was not loud, but every skeleton received it.
"Four sides. Enter from four sides."
"Do not charge the ranks. Do not attack."
"You need only—walk in."
The undead made no sound.
They simply began to move.
Lurching and swaying, they scattered from the four faces of the knoll, drawing slowly toward the outer perimeter of the Uesugi camp.
From the streambank to the east.
From the underbrush to the west.
From the corridor entrance to the south.
From the ridgeline to the north.
Two hundred skeletons, from every direction, surged toward the camp without a sound.
The Uesugi main camp.
At the southern sentry post, a young ashigaru dozed against the wooden palisade.
His watch for the first half of the night was almost over; in another quarter-hour he could hand off and go back to his tent to sleep.
His eyelids grew heavier and heavier.
Then—
A hand suddenly clapped down onto the wooden palisade.
A greyish-white hand of bone, no flesh, its knuckles broken, scraps of rotted sinew still hanging from the finger-bones.
The ashigaru's eyes snapped open, and snapped straight into a half-faced thing beyond the fence—in its hollow sockets, dark green corpse-fire stared right at him.
The ashigaru froze for a heartbeat, and then his eyes went wide!
Though the existence of yōkai was common enough in this age, the proportion of undead that human eyes could actually see was still very small, and to encounter one within a military camp was all but unheard of.
And so, in the sudden shock of what he beheld.
A scream tore through the silence of the night.
Then came a second, and a third.
East, west, north—almost at the same moment, cries of terror burst out.
"Demons! There are Demons!"
"The dead—the dead are rising!"
"It's a vengeful Demon!"
The camp erupted in an instant.
Campfires were kicked over by panicked soldiers, tents dragged down by stumbling horses, the clash of weapons and the shrieks of men blending into one.
Soldiers rushed out of their tents, fumbling for their weapons—and then, once they saw clearly the scene at the camp's perimeter—they froze.
Under the moonlight.
Red mist crept in from every side, like blood-water seeping up from beneath the earth.
Within the mist, countless broken figures advanced slowly.
They made no sound at all.
No roar, no snarl; even the clatter of bone against bone was swallowed by the blood mist.
Only silence, a silence like death.
And it was this very silence that chilled the blood more than any bellow.
The skeletons moved very slowly, crooked and lurching, like a swarm of infants just learning to walk.
But their numbers—rendered through the blood mist—far exceeded the truth.
The shadows of two hundred skeletons were dragged, magnified, and warped by the blood mist.
In the soldiers' eyes it was not two hundred, but two thousand.
Even more.
The dead filling the hills and covering the fields, crawling up from beneath the earth, coming toward their camp.
"The Night Parade of a Hundred Demons…"
Someone spat out those words with a trembling voice.
Then panic spread like a plague.
And at the very center of that panic.
At the summit of the knoll directly facing the camp's southern side.
A figure took shape within the blood mist.
Grey robe, ashen hair, a crimson oni mask.
Purple arcs of lightning leapt soundlessly about his body, lighting up the pair of blood-red eyes behind the oni mask.
He stood there.
Two hundred undead spread out behind him, beside him, beneath his feet.
Moonlight poured down over his head, casting his shadow toward the camp.
That shadow—
covered half the camp.
____
Gift for Everyone: Once we hit 20 Powerstones, I'll release +1 bonus chapter
________________________________________
If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)
👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉